Technique and tactics The architecture of operatives who design strategies and implement tactics in disinformation campaigns includes: 1) Employing PR strategists and creatives: Elite strategists use marketing techniques to align campaign objectives with consistent messaging through “branding” and employ locally informed creative writers, who “weaponize popular vernaculars to maximize the reach of social media posts.”101 2) Leveraging digital influencers: Anonymous influencers and key opinion leaders (celebrities, pundits, etc) commanding between 50,000 and 2 million followers) weaponize popular culture trends and disseminate manufactured narratives through Twitter (via trending rankings) and Facebook.102 3) Amplifying through community-level fake operators: Sub-contracted workers amplify messaging and localize narratives using pre-drafted, script-based messaging, predetermined schedules for media blasting, and click strategies. 4) Engaging grassroots intermediaries: Fan page moderators, unpaid volunteers and members of political organizations drive real grassroots engagement with disinformation by manufacturing “illusions of engagement”. Impacts and implications Despite efforts by Rappler and others to shore up free speech and provide counter-narratives to the proDuterte propaganda machine, Duterte continues to use misinformation and coordinated disinformation campaigns to obfuscate controversial policies and practices, such as the war on drugs. The Philippines is now teeming with fake news, and other political agents are adopting, adapting and scaling up the digital disinformation model. This ought to be concerning for organizations working in international development and peacebuilding for various reasons, including: 1. There is an underlying system that propagates political disinformation in the Philippines. It thrives on an unregulated and highly profitable industry of digital advertising that incentivizes and exploits labor arrangements through “digital sweatshops” for political deception work. This digital economy of disinformation cannot be decoupled from the digital data industry. According to analysts at New America Foundation: “Every post, click, search, and share is logged to a user profile, grouped into a segmented audience, and fed into machine learning algorithms. This data allows advertisers to infer an individual’s preferences, behaviors, and beliefs—all of which inform highly targeted digital advertising campaigns. Accumulated data is ..used not to drive purchasing decisions but to influence sentiment, political views, and voting behavior through precision propaganda….. Political disinformation succeeds because it follows the structural logic, benefits from the products, and perfects the strategies of the broader digital advertising market.”103 2. These examples flip the “democratization” argument on its head, as proponents of so-called “Liberation Technologies” struggle to contend with the ways in which elites exploit the very nature and mechanisms of social media to control narratives and manipulate mass-based appeals for political 101 Ong and Cabañes, 45. 102 Ibid, 34. 103 Ghoash and Scott, 3-5. MERCY CORPS The Weaponization of Social Media: How social media can spark violence and what can be done about it 46